Preaching Connection: Grief

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The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died: my father died a few days short of his eighty-fifth birthday and my mother a month short of her ninety-first, both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was...
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“The Sutton Place Story” in The Stories of John Cheever

“Renee put on a black dress the next day and took a cab to the funeral parlor. As soon as she opened the door, she was in the hands of a gloved and obsequious usher, ready to sympathize with a grief more profound and sedate than any grief of hers would ever be.”
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The Sweet Hereafter

Billy Ansel (who has lost his twin children in a school bus crash) speaks: “Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped to clarify your sense, not of the person who died, but of your own self. And if you...
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Additional content related to Grief

Commentary

Lamentations 1:1-6

Cheery this lection is not.  The New Testament sermon starter based on Luke 17 for this week is a bit of a challenging passage and so some preachers might be tempted to swap out this week’s Old Testament reading for the Gospel one but if so, then turning to this downbeat passage might make one…

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Commentary

Revelation 21:1-6

While we sometimes say, “The devil is in the details,” we might say part of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s “gospel is in the details.” After all, some of Revelation 21’s greatest news lies in its verb tenses. In it, the Spirit inspires John to see “a new heaven and a new earth” (1). This is,…

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Commentary

Revelation 21:1-6

Christ’s revelation to the apostle John includes what sometimes seems like an endless series of chilling images.  Nearly all of them portray intense persecution, bloody battles and immense suffering.  It’s a revelation that, if we didn’t know its “happy ending,” we might quit reading after about six or seven chapters. Some modern Christians assume that…

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Commentary

Revelation 7:9-17

“Is this heaven?” isn’t just a question an Iowa farmer poses in the movie, Field of Dreams.  Readers, preachers and teachers of Revelation 7:9-17 might ask the same question of it.  Does its John describe the heavenly realm as God currently configures it?  Or is he describing the new earth and heaven that Jesus will…

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Commentary

Genesis 45:1-15

God always makes the dreams God gives God’s adopted sons and daughters come true.  Sometimes, however, it takes so long for that to happen that it seems that the dream, if not the dreamers, dies. As Genesis 45 opens, God has partially fulfilled Joseph’s dreams by putting him in charge of both Egypt and his…

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Commentary

Matthew 14:13-21

John the Baptist was the last great Old Testament prophet and the first great New Testament herald of the Gospel. And yet he dies because of a stupid, senseless, lusty, and boozy blank check promise made by Herod to a young girl whose provocative dancing had clearly stirred him on more than one level.  John…

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